Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Thank you to my family for their continued faith in me, especially my mother, who helped me write my first query letter to a publisher at age eight and provided me a steady supply of typewriters each time one ran out of ink.

I would not have completed this book without the encouragement and feedback of the faculty at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln, especially Jonis Agee, the late Gerald Shapiro, Judith Slater, Amelia Montes, and Margaret Jacobs. Thank you to Tim O’Brien and my friends in his 2008 residency, whose initial questions urged me to continue writing beyond the first chapter. Thank you to David Mura and the folks in the VONA/Voices Workshop for their community. A warm thanks to Susan Hubbard, whose character sketch assignment led to the earliest incarnation of Job Ogbonnaya over a decade ago.

A big thanks to the estates of Louise VanSickle, Wilbur and Elizabeth Gaffney, the University of Nebraska Office of Graduate Studies and the Presidential Fellowship committee, the faculty and staff at the University of Dayton, and the esteemed Herbert Woodward Martin, for whom the Herbert W. Martin Postgraduate fellowship is named. Your generous support enabled me to steal away the hours to write.

And a very special thanks to Anitra Budd and Lisa Kopel, who always believed in the vision of the book and whose insights were invaluable.

Excerpts have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Tampa Review, and Passages North.

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Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Garamond with Century Gothic used as display.

Julie Iromuanya’s work has appeared in Tampa Review, Passages North, the Kenyon Review, and Cream City Review, among other publications. She earned her PhD from the University of Nebraska — Lincoln and is currently an assistant professor at Northeastern Illinois University, where she teaches creative writing and Africana literature. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.